Home is an abstract concept that requires a physical manifestation. While you can examine the concept without the manifestation, you cannot receive the effects that Home provides without a physical location to attach it to, the effects being specific associations and emotions such as safety and belonging. Joining the concept with the manifestation requires a catalyst, and for many, that catalyst is stories. The stories give Home its form: their narratives shape the Home’s effects and their details link those effects with the chosen location. Those who use stories as the catalyst thus only need to refer to those stories to know where their Home is and what it means to them.
“Figuring out this place we call home is a problem” therefore for those who either cannot choose a physical manifestation or do not possess a suitable catalyst (Chamberlin 87). Even if a catalyst is available, those who do not believe in it cannot believe in Home.
Home as a concept tends to require exclusivity: many, probably most people cannot enjoy Home’s effects while acknowledging that other people are enjoying the same Home, without permission. The concept of Home cannot be shared, but the physical location can be, and this intolerance creates conflicts such as the one between European and Indigenous people in Canada. How is this conflict fought? The physical location cannot be attacked, as it is the prize. The concept of Home cannot be attacked, as it exists only as an abstract. The only possible target is the catalyst.
Put differently, the history of many of the world’s conflicts is a history of dismissing a different belief or different behaviour as unbelief or misbehaviour, and of discrediting those who believe or behave differently as infidels or savages. (78)
Whereas the “fact” that Chamberlin gives before this statement emphasizes the result of the problem, this statement emphasizes the method (78). To discount a culture’s catalyst is to discount their claim to their chosen land as their Home. However, this is not done by rejecting the culture’s stories, but by rejecting their belief that their stories have the power to turn a land into their Home. This, to use Chamberlin’s terminology, defines the distinction between “Them and Us” (239). Our stories matter; theirs don’t.
The consequence of understanding the method behind the problem is that the solution becomes clearer:
Like home, it [common ground] is at the centre of contradiction. It is a place where what we have in common is neither true nor untrue, a place where we come together in agreement not about what to believe but about what it is to believe. (240)
Chamberlin thus suggests that cultures reconcile by bonding through their shared use of catalysts. This entails the removal of exclusivity and the rejection of its power as a truth-marker, bringing to foreground the contradiction that something means something and something else. It requires the acknowledgement that many Homes can and do exist on the same Earth.
Works Cited
Chamberlin, J. Edward. If This Is Your Land, Where Are Your Stories? Toronto: Vintage Canada, 2004. Print.
“What Does Home Mean to You?” Real Simple. Time Inc. Network, n.d. Web. 22 May 2015.